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Google Penalty Investigation

I've recently had a google penalty, and have spent a long while working through tying up any loose ends with my site (I'm building a new one, so you'll still see some probs on my current one).

My search referrals do slowly seem to be recovering, but only for variations of terms that are similar to 'bike repair'. Now, my site does primarily offer bike repair advice, so that's a good thing, but I'm not yet ranking for any of my specific keywords. One example is that I used to rank quite high for the term 'schrader valve'.

Is this a signal of anything in particular? Or can I not read anything specific into this?

4 Responses

It depends on what you mean by the word "penalty". If you had a manual penalty (Google sent you a message through Google Webmaster Tools), then the best answer is usually to remove the offensive links, submit a reconsideration request, and replace those links with good ones. If, on the other hand, you had a drastic drop in rank due to an algorithm update, removing links will do nothing for you. Based on what you're saying (and correct me if I'm wrong), this sounds like what is happening with you.

In that scenario, the links that got you the ranking for "schrader valve" were most likely devalued and don't count against you. They're just not helping you anymore either. Your time would be best invested into earning stronger links.

Not quite right on both counts actually. I didn't get a message in WMT and my sudden drop in referrals doesn't coincide with an algorithm change. I think this means it's quite likely the problem is not to do with my links? Could be wrong though, I don't really know what I'm talking about.

I think it's an on-page optimisation issue, although if my drop happened suddenly could that still be the case? My html is a bit of a mess- there were some broken links in the footer to my disclaimer etc and had a ton of internal links pointed at 301's plus some unintentional hidden text etc (hence the site rebuild).

I was slowly starting to rank better and better for a whole load of specific keywords, surely all my links didn't take a hit?

If there's no message, then you should look at your links (find over optimisation problems) and onpage (duplicates, canonical problems, engagement, 404's) and the exact date when traffic started to drop

There's really not much for your to look at beside those.

1. Identify the date = correlate with past penalty dates. If it's recently (with all the serp changes happening since 2 weeks ago) then you probably got hit by a panda.

2. Fix your onpage first and get it out of the way. Fix every suggestion in webmaster tools.

3. Dig through your link anchors then grab all the links that point to that anchor. Gauge if they are quality links, if most of them aren't, then you better start adding URL only quality links

4. Time. All you can do is wait for it to recover. All the while, you should be building other sources of traffic and probably start another site just for backup.

There are a lot of moving parts here and you could be the victim of sites that linked to you being deindexed or penalised, of some kind of phrase specific drop but without more data we are simply guessing here.

I would do the following:

1. Dig into your analytics and take a look at the drop date. Compare this to the algorithm dates here on SEOMoz or use the super cool panguintool.com to see all updates and algorithm changes overlaid over your anlaytics.

2. Taking anything gleaned from the above review the traffic drop in your analytics. Look at the period two weeks before and after the drop (you indicated it was sudden?) - look at the landing pages, the keywords, what are the big changes? This again gives you more intel to further your investigation. Is the entire drop tied into a couple of keywords that are now performing more poorly.

4. Audit your back links - where have they come from? What are they like? Editorial? Directories? Are the linking sites indexed or do they appear to have been penalised? Use some of the tools out there like Link Detective and Link Detox from Link Research Tools to give you some more intel.

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There will a reason for this but without a link it is impossible to give anything other than general advice. If the link is sensitive fire me a PM. I will still feedback here in the public forum for all to benefit but I will maintain your anonymity if that's important.

If you can drop a link, you will benefit from several SEO super sleuths taking a look so I would always recommend that.

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